when in doubt, check the source

sorry for the absence. I've been busy. Now that I somehow managed to get into the winter holidays, though some would have argued (I really didn't knew until yesterday that I will be able to take this vacation), I have a little story to share.

It's about the source of not some genius program. And not Domino. But WebSphere. Actually, the startup script of a WebSphere. startServer.sh

I learn all the time. And I lost a day, just to figure out the difference between AIX and Linux, or between WAS5 and WAS6 (does not matter) with regard to above mentioned script.

How do I start a WAS server, named server1:

AIX / WAS6:
> pwd
/
>/usr/ibm/websphere/appserver/startServer.sh server1
starting ......

So you see, I got used to call the startup script on AIX (or WAS6) from no matter what location in the file-system.

Guess what: on a Linux customer, or perhaps because they are still using WAS5, this didn't worked :) It just happened it didn't worked when I was following a federation operation. And failed. And questions came, because it threw errors about input/output/redirection files not being there, not accessible, not having permissions. Did I do something wrong with the federation, did I not set some parameters .... what happened ? Try again, scratch the head, then again, then the day was lost.

Next day:
Environment for WAS is loaded with setupCmdLine.sh script. Errors because the environment not loaded. OK. WHY ?

Answer:
because startServer.sh needs to run on Linux from the /bin folder of WAS, so it can find the setupCmdLine.sh script

So, above sequence of starting:
Linux / WAS5:
> pwd
/
>cd /bin
>./startServer.sh server1
starting ......

And I found this only after actually looking into the startServer.sh script, just to see that it does a 'dirname' command and expects to load the WAS environment, otherwise default OS JAVA is used, which gets errors not even close to the actual problem.

So, if such a thing happens to you, check the source :)